Are the cognates “adult” and “adulterate”?
Adult appear to have derived from the Latin term adultus, meaning grown up, mature, adult, ripe.
Adulterate (and its cognate adultery ) is reported to derive from the Latin adulterare
Are the meanings and derivation of Adulterated and Adulterate, directly related, or is this just a coincidence of spelling?
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From John Ayto, Arcade Dictionary of Word Origins (1990):
adultery Neither adultery nor the related adulterate have any connection to adult. Both come finally from the Latin verb adulterare ‘debauch, corruption’ (which may have been based on Latin alter ‘other’, with the notion of pollution from some extraneous source). By the regular processes of phonetic change, adulterare passed into Old French as avoutrer, and this was the form which first reached English, as avouter (used both verbally ‘commit adultery,’ and nominally, ‘adulterer’) and as the nouns avoutery ‘adultery,’ and avouterer ‘adultererer. Almost from the first they coexisted in English alongside adult-forms deriving either from Low French or direct from Latin; during the 15th to 17th centuries these gradually ousted the avout-forms Adulter, the equivalent of avouter, clung on until the end of the 18th century, but the noun was superseded in the end by adulterer and the verb by a new form, adulterate, directly based on the past participle of Latin adulterare, which continued to mean ‘commit adultery’ until the mid 19th century. In the late 19th century, in the absence of a noun avouter (see table).
From Robert Hendrickson, The Facts on File Encyclopedia of Word and Phrase Origins (1991),
adultery. Contrary to popular opinion this word is not related to adult. From the Latin adulterere, “pollute, to commit adultery,” can we trace the word adultarate to the root of the word. Shakespeare uses the English word adulterate in King John (1596): “She adulterates hourly with thine Uncle John. What is a wrong saying?” From
Merriam-Webster, Webster’s Word Histories (1989): adolescent
The English adjectives adolescent, adult, and old, which designate stages of life share a common Indo-European ancestor, whose meaning was ‘to nourish’ or ‘to grow’ Alere, ‘to nourish’, and its derivative alescere, ‘to grow’, are Latin descendants of this Indo-European root. Latin adolescere, “to grow up”, is formed by the addition of the Latin prefix “” meaning ‘to’ or ‘at’ to the verb alescere. The present participle of adolescere is adolescens, which gives us English adolescent. Adolescence person, then, is one who is growing up. Latin adultus is the past participle of adolescere.
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